Glass
by Lines-Drawn
Summary: Sometimes, we forget that there's something beyond the happily ever after, that the kiss doesn't end everything and there's a future after that. Sometimes, we forget that everything is breakable, just like glass.
1. Heartbeat

A short trip back to Wonderland to see old friends had seemed necessary when they'd found that they could. Alice had asked why they could when a Club had come popping out the Looking Glass. Hatter hadn't. He'd been far too busy being displeased that Alice had brought the wondrous logic that she wanted to see it now that Jack had been king for a while, but he'd agreed, wanting to go. As much as he loved her and enjoyed her world, he still missed his good, old, crazy home. The trip back would be short, the Club had said; it didn't matter. They hashed out a time ('soonish', since time was a malleable element, as Hatter tried to explain to Alice). The Club had left and then so had they, soonish.

Being greeted by Charlie grinning down at him after he'd woken up on the other side of the Looking Glass hadn't been the most pleasant experience, but he was glad enough to see the White Knight once Alice had done some concerned peering over him herself.

Someone had tried to stop them. He didn't remember who. He simply grabbed her hand, and then they were off. He had momentarily faltered outside. Everything looked different, shrubs clipped and buildings scrubbed. Then he had realized it was much the same, just cleaner. Ew. Alice had faltered too, but at the sight of being so close to an edge and so high, not from surprise. He had grinned at her, and she had smiled back. Then he'd been off, dragging her along as he ran for somewhere.

Some of the buildings were still abandoned, empty and forsaken inside even if they were cleaned up outside. He ran for a while, ignoring her protests and paying her no heed. If she didn't want to come, he knew she could kick his ass. He peered into buildings, hat askew, but he didn't stop.

The only point at which he ever released her was when they stumbled across a porch lined with roses. With a mischievous grin, he plucked one. He twirled it in his fingers, enjoying seeing her mild amusement at his tricks. He handed it to her with a silly little bow. She took it, so gently and with great refinement. Once she had it in her fingers, he grabbed her other hand, and started off again. He grinned at her with an odd kindness when she spluttered more protests. She never really asked him to stop, and he loved her for that and everything else too.

Again, he peered into buildings. There was a pretty one, a boring tan outside but a faded pinkish shade on the walls inside to match the ratty old shirt he'd was wearing. He'd dressed up in his getup from Wonderland from back when they'd first met for the occasion. He pushed open the door and pulled her inside. He finally set her free, but she hung by him, which made him grin wider.

Having no plan to his escapade, he kissed her. She kissed back. It felt perfect. He was home, not in her strange world, and they were someplace random, kissing. Not a better day. She almost dropped the flower. It pricked against his fingers and he caught it, drawing away. Passing it to her, he ambled deeper into the empty building, twirling.

"Where are we going? We were supposed to go see Jack. And Charlie;" she said, hurriedly adding the White Knight so he couldn't go get snippy about the king.

Her efforts didn't keep him from making a slight face, but he hurriedly grinned at her. "On an adventure;" he told her. Away he spun, deeper into the space, away with her following after him, her laughter in the air.

Hatter disappeared around a corner, his askew hat the last thing visible. With some caution, she followed him. It wasn't enough, that caution. He kissed her quick, again, grinning while he did it. She laughed at him. He liked her laughing at him, a personality quirk of his. He drew back. Then he kissed her again, a deeper kiss that she reciprocated.

Eventually, he drew back. His eyes never left her, still grinning with cheekiness. Then the pounding of feet came, and an odd slithering, whispering shuffle. She turned first, so quick, and he turned more slowly. At first, there was nothing. Then the hall was flooded with a flurry of people. They weren't Suits. Some of them were girls. Some of them were boys. Some of them were things he didn't recognized, the most common that he saw being something rather like a humanoid sheep. Most were dressed in solid red or solid white. He saw one in blue, and a few in a shimmering black.

The first blow hit him. He struck back. Someone fell. There were more attacking him. He punched, once, then again. He fought to see Alice, but she was holding her own, having been pulled away by one until she smacked the adversary down. He fought for himself, efforts to get to her made in vain. Much of the random group who had swarmed them fell without much of a fight, falling under a single blow. The dozen or so that had tried to take him became only three with only a fair number of bruises on him to show for it, the rest of the bodies lying groaning or silent on the ground around him.

The ones left posed a challenge, though. One of them was in the shimmering black, another in blood red, the third in snow white. However, they were quicker, more nimble, having survived the first wave with an ease though he hadn't noticed the distinction of them before. He struck at one, but found nothing where he punched. The red soldier kicked at him. He hurriedly dodged, sparing a glance towards Alice. Only three remained fighting her too. Two of them looked much the same as two as him, both nimble and quick men, one dressed in red and the other in white. He didn't get a good look at the third. He only got a clear picture that the darkly clad figure attacking his girlfriend seemed to stand back while the others danced about and looked a lot bigger.

Hatter dodged another kick. He punched one, making a bit of contact with some flesh. Whichever one he hit, because they wouldn't stop moving and he couldn't tell, winced. He tried to surge through an opening, to move and get to Alice. However, two of them blocked him off, pushing back with a flurry of kicks of which he managed to dodge a few. White and black faced him. He must have hit the red one. Faintly, he felt curiosity. He hadn't even hit the red one that hard, with his bad hand, but the soldier was gone, somewhere amongst the others on the floor that weren't getting up despite their minor injuries.

In the end, it wasn't as if he was given much time to think on it. They kept kicking. He kept swinging. He brought another down. Only the black one remained. The darkly clad soldier moved like a dancer, if dancers could kill, which he supposed some of them could, not that he was doing much supposing. He swung, his better hand, his hammer hand, without a thought. He got a swift kick in the ribs as a reward.

Stumbling back, he half straightened. Then he ducked. Finally, he managed to stand properly. He punched. The soldier moved too slowly, for once, and fell, and a scream rang out. It hadn't been the silent soldier.

Whirling, Hatter stared, trying to fight against time and a killing weight as he saw Alice fall. Only one of the attackers was left, the burly dark one he had only glimpsed before. Dressed in odd, clinging armor, the soldier, more a knight in appearance, had a sword. He hadn't noticed it before. She hadn't called for help.

Screaming, he charged the knight. He didn't think. It hardly registered when he observed that the features of the killer's face were oddly like those of a horse. He punched and punched, over and over, with either hand, even more wild than before. He felt bone crush once, a sickening snap, as he shattered an arm. He didn't stop until the knight collapsed.

Then he turned to Alice. Kneeling beside her, he pressed his hands at the injury it took him no time to a find - a stab wound in her chest. However, she gave no response. He felt no breath. "Alice;" he whispered. "Alice!"

It took a while for the reality to set into his mind. A lot of blood, her blood, was on his hands by the time he started to sit back.

Alice was dead. His Alice was dead. What had happened? No war. No sense. No heroine's valiant funeral in sight. Just a random attack he'd led her to that he hadn't been expecting. It was his fault. There was nothing. She was just dead. It couldn't be real. It was a dream. Clinging to desperate thoughts, he held her tightly to his chest.

As he was, clinging desperately to her, not crying but more senseless than he normally was, he didn't notice the rose he had plucked for her lying nearby, somehow only a little disturbed by the fight and abandoned near a wall. He didn't notice it begin to fall apart. He didn't notice the knight begin to stir, reaching valiantly for his sword. He didn't notice when there was a quiet noise, a flurry of motion, and the knight was laid peacefully to rest, one death amongst the mostly unconscious bodies, one death of two, while a new figure appeared in the wide, littered corridor behind him.

* * *

Hello everyone! This is Linny, the author of this story!

First off, the majority of the characters in this fanfiction can be either credited to those behind Syfy's Alice, Lewis Carroll, or rare mythologies of several cultures. I only lay claim to the writing within this, with thanks to filmgrl13 for beta reading.

Now, I'd like to welcome you all, and give a couple of quick bits of information. This is the first fanfiction I've done in a while, and one of a few I've ever done. For the most part, I do original works. However, I quite like this story.

Despite that, I am rather busy, and I will not be able to constantly update. For the sake of any readers that are attracted to this, I will try to update once a week with new chapters. Anyway, thanks for reading! This is just the start, and someone's already dead, oh my!


	2. The Rose

A shadow fell across Hatter, and he was jerked from his shock by simple instinct and old habits. He whirled and lunged. His hands found flesh and he surged forward, forcing his possible killer back. He was stopped as the shadow's caster hit the hall with a quick hiss of pain. After a moment, his vision, blurred by motion and a lack of sense from loss, cleared. He blinked at the face of who he held as it finally registered in his mind.

The petite woman blinked back at him with amber eyes, the hiss of pain long gone from her manner. She barely looked five feet. In his hold, the tips of her toes just touched the ground, gingerly supporting her so that his forceful grip didn't force all air from her chest. She wore no shoes. Light tan breeches, loose and cut right below her knees, covered her legs. A loose white shirt hung over her body, her frame much smaller than the baggy clothes. Around her neck, a thong of leather covered in charms and feathers hung. Her hair was short and strikingly white. The features of her face, fine but fierce, remained cool despite his panting, wild attack. While she seemed unsurprised by him and calm, the muscles of her body held taunt under his grasp. Despite that, the complexities of her manner continued, as she seemed to flow, threatening to slip from his grasp. He put it down to insanity and tried to focus.

Hatter considered punching her, even killing her, trying to remind himself that she hadn't done anything specifically to him. The moment froze. He struggled to regain his breath, which he hadn't realized he had lost. She remained perfectly still, unmoving and waiting. However, her patience eventually waned. Fleetingly, her features sharpened for the briefest second, eyes narrowing at him in frustration. That look quickly fled, and she continued to regard him with a slippery calmness. "Deep breath;" she advised in a soft voice.

Taking her advice, he drew in air. The tightness in his chest lessened. He almost felt better, but he didn't want to feel better. She was gone. He could remember that, even in his increasing madness, the insanity that he had always had within him as a Wonderlander increasing with the loss of a part of his confused soul. He hid the breath under the pretenses of interrogating her. "Who are you? What are you doing! What happened? Here, now!"

"You can call me Rose;" she told him. "Who are you?" The question came as if posed by an innocent child. She tilted her head to the side, even as the action pulled awkwardly on her skin, and regarded him with her eyes, which came off so very amber as they caught the dim light of the corridor.

"What does it matter to you who I am?" Hatter wasn't in his happy place, and a desperate anger laced his tone. None of what was happening was about him. It was about her, about Rose because she was there, a tangible presence in front of him, about Alice because she was gone, beyond his hold. "What's happening! What happened?"

"I don't know." A strict honesty came from Rose. The way she said it, with sadness, with heaviness, made it impossible, to his weary mind, suddenly trusting of that fact, for it to be a lie. "Something bad, but I don't know what. I can deal with the lack of an exact plan I can see, but I can't deal with this. It isn't old, it isn't new, and it doesn't play by the rules." By that last part, she sounded vaguely angry, disgruntled.

Not understanding anything of what she said after that first part, and not wanting to hear it, Hatter finally let her go, stepping back and barely managing not to trip over any bodies. She slid down the wall as he released the pressure, taking the tiny half fall in her knees and then slowly rising with a grace made for far quicker actions. "So, I'm Rose, and you are?" She sounded in a hurry, but she didn't press him too much for his name. While she kept her head tilted towards him, her eyes darted up and down the corridor.

"Hatter;" he mumbled. She started at that, gaze immediately shifting back to him. The tension he had detected in her body became violently clear. Her shoulders rolled as she shifted in an unnatural fashion, body twisting as she looked him over. Leaning closer, she shifted. Still very much emotionally exhausted and not liking the new developments, he raised his good hand, ready to knock the living daylights out of her.

In the end, though, she turned away and fell back into a hardly threatening position, her tiny frame looking elegant but unobtrusive. "Nice to meet you, Hatter;" she intoned to him, eyes darting up and down the hallway once again, not looking at him. She caught movement. One of the fallen soldiers stirred. "We should go;" she informed him.

"Go where? Go with you?" Hatter kept his fist raised, the momentary trust he had felt for the mysterious Rose gone.

"You want to end up dead like the pretty girl on the floor, or do you want to come with me?" Her ethereal, calm way of speaking vanished, replaced with a flash of snappishness. She fixed him with a cool stare and raised one eyebrow.

The odd woman's words made it real, more real than it had been before that point. Alice was dead. Something inside his chest died, but the rest of it was still living. Without Alice, it was easy to return to old habits. Survive. "Where are we going?" He didn't consent with ease.

"Someplace safer, but, anyway, whatever you do, keep up with me;" she told him. Darting nimbly over fallen figures, she made her way to the next corner in the hall. He hurriedly followed, but she paused there. Her eyes closed. Her body contorted in an unnatural fashion again, before taking on an unmatchable grace and fluidity. Her limbs lengthened and then shrunk. Her body tugged and pushed itself into a smaller, entirely different shape.

Blinking in surprise and confusion, Hatter suddenly found himself gazing at a long, limber white cat. She turned her head to regard him with bright amber eyes, and he caught sight of a collar of feathers and charms around her neck. Rose was a cat, or at least capable of turning into one. His mind had a great deal of trouble trying to understand that concept.

However, Rose was off, moving with leaps and bound along the corridor. Remembering her advice and seeing no point in not following it, he ran to keep up with her. Through corridors, she led him. They emerged out of the building at some point, but she continued, leading him along ledges and pathways. They used staircase after staircase. Much of the time, they seemed to go down, but they sometimes went upwards. In no time, he was very confused. The white cat didn't stop, continuing to run along, always well ahead of him.

Eventually, they ducked into another building. Down and down, she showed the way through a set of dark corridors, and then down a set of darker stairs. At the very bottom, light lay, and her bright coat was always visible. Focusing on continuing to run, his breath slipping from him, he didn't pause.

Finally, she stopped at the very bottom of the steps. He halted behind her. The feline form began to waver, and the human version of Rose suddenly appeared in a flash of white fur and white hair and the tinkle of charms tickling feathers. She offered him a small smile. The grin looked a little strained, but the running didn't appear to have taxed her in the slightest. Moving with what he then put down to feline grace, she pushed open the worn, wooden door that ended the stairs. The light leaked through it. She stepped over the threshold and he followed, blinking at the warm glow that greeted them.

"Who's that?"

When his sight cleared, he found himself in a cluttered burrow of a room, with a few doorways made of curtains off of it. Leaning against a battered piano, which looked like it might just have been pretending to be a piano and could have been something entirely different, a tall, slender young man stood. He had odd black and light brown hair that looked rather like an owl's feathers. He wore an unnatural grin, lopsided and twisted. His eyes shone hazel, both managing to seem very green and very brown at the same time. He wore a slick purple suit with an indigo tie and looked quite amused with both himself and the two people in front of him.

"This is Hatter, Cheshire;" Rose informed him, looking about the room with her hands on her hips. She didn't look all that engaged with speaking to the odd figure in front of her. She glanced back at her guest. "Hatter, this is the Cheshire Cat. He's my brother, sort of." She sounded less than enthused. Cat. That made sense. They were both cats.

"Wait, the Hatter?" Cheshire sounded less impressed and more malicious.

"Yes, the Hatter;" she confirmed. The Hatter? The spoken of man puffed out his chest without even really thinking about it, to numb to even stop himself.

"Hey, nice girlfriend, mate;" Ches commented, grinning like the devil.

"She's also dead;" Rose said, cutting into his teasing.

"Alice is dead? Shoot, we're screwed;" Ches replied, making a childishly concerned face and sucking air through his teeth. Rose opened her mouth to add something, then glanced at Hatter and shut it. She let out a long sigh, and Ches grinned, giving up on actually trying to look concerned.

Hatter stared at them. His body felt numb. He considered getting upset by their comments, but he couldn't muster the strength. "So, what now?" he asked, the words turning into a yawn. The motion felt painful. He shouldn't be tired, but the numbness weighed down on him. He frowned.

Rose glanced at him, and then glanced at the Cheshire to keep him from saying something stupid. He feigned innocence, mouth wide open in a toothy grin. He skipped off, whistling under his breath, and disappeared into a different room of the cramped lair. "Sleep;" she declared to Hatter. With her words, he felt his own tiredness truly wash over him. It had nothing to do with his body and everything do with his mind. Though his feet could support him, he found himself collapsing to the floor.

Arms wrapped around him with gentle firmness. Rose had caught him. He stared at her in surprise. She was strong, since she managed to support him despite his greater size. Not saying a word, she hauled him over to a couch, hidden by an odd potted plant, and laid him to rest on that. Then she walked off across the room. He fell asleep before he could see where she went.

* * *

Woo, chapter two!

As before, the majority of the characters in this fanfiction can be either credited to those behind Syfy's Alice, Lewis Carroll, or rare mythologies of several cultures. I only lay claim to the writing within this, with thanks to filmgrl13 for beta reading.

That even applies to Rose. She is not, in fact, my own creation. She's a small folklore figure. ^^ Of course, the portrayal is mine.

For anyone out there, please review! Let me know how I'm doing! Also, yes, sorry for the delay in this chapter. I had to get a skin biopsy.


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